YouTube is now aggressively responding to Zoë Keating's post about Music Key, calling her claims about content removal 'patently false'. They have also demanded a retraction from Digital Music News. [...]
[Update: Sat. morning: After discovering that Keating was taking detailed notes of her conversation with a YouTube representative, YouTube appears to be re-grouping to clarify their policies and figure out exactly what artists are being told. They have also not clearly explained why they are demanding a retraction from Digital Music News. More as it develops.]
[Update: Monday morning: No response yet. YT told DMN on Friday that they were 'reaching out' to Forbes as well; Forbes hasn't changed a very similar headline]
Wait for them to throw a random employee under the bus, issue a fauxpology about your failure to understand what they really meant, then "clarify" their terms in a way that actually changes nothing, in 3, 2, 1...
If only there existed some technology Google could have used to learn about who they were dealing with, and whether she had a history of, say, releasing transcripts of conversations with companies who screw her over.
The bit about "and delete your channel" in her description stuck me as wrong/off. Google wouldn't endorse an option that meant less stuff in their catalog, even as an "or else", they want to have everything. I suspect the person she was talking to assumed that was how it worked, in the absence of actual guidance. Someone higher up saw it, went "that's not right" and then they had an internal kerfluffle because there were different unspoken assumptions about how it was going to work.
Unless you are the one who sets Google policy, your guess about the ways in which the actual words of their actual official representative differ from what they should have said is, well, not terribly interesting.
But by all means, rush to the defense of a multinational megacorp who decided to launch a media offensive slandering an indie artist as a liar, when that's demonstrably not true.
Update(?) by Billboard:
"I write music. I play the cello and the computer. There are dots over my e." -Zoë Keating
There's a dot over your "i", too!
The lowercase letter I normally has a dot over it, so that's not particularly notable or noteworthy. An E with an umlaut is certainly less common in english.
"I write music. I play the cello and the computer. There are dots over my e." -Zoë Keating
There's a dot over your "i", too!